


After Ares

by french_crap



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Family, Gen, Hope, PTSD, Trauma, after the war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 05:15:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13380933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/french_crap/pseuds/french_crap
Summary: "I remembered it being difficult, when everything was still happening. Now it was over and you’d think it would be easier. But at least in the present, I knew it was real. Now it was the past and I didn’t know anymore what was real. Was it the future? Was it all me? If it was truly over, was I too?"Following canon as loosely as possible, this is Draco a month after Voldemort's death, incapable of feeling at ease in Malfoy Manor. This is Draco leaving to find himself far away from the past. This is Draco returning to Hogwarts years later to meet someone who finally sees him for who he wants to become, not for who he used to be. This is Draco, not entirely making it back into the present-tense of life, but bringing life back into the present-tense, struggling, but brave.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Part of my Januvery Shorts series, those three chapters were a prompt for myself to make each chapter under 1k words. Thus the vignette-style of it all. Just plunge into it, don't think too much. Indulge the emotions, from the horror to the inevitable cheesiness.

Listen.  
Lock the door.  
Close the curtains.  
“Lumos.”  
Go to bed.  
Listen.

The whispers you hear? They’re not real. The touches you feel? They’re not real. And you? You’re not real either?  
You left with the voices, with the scent of rotting flesh. You left this place the same way you left this earth, you haven’t, but you’re not here anymore either. You are stuck. Stuck in freedom and haunted by the ghosts of the past, the present, the future. The ghosts that you are. You’re not real either, no. Solely your name on the family tree speaks of your existence and proves that perhaps your nightmares are all too real after all. They tell you you’re alive. But if you were alive, would it not all be different?

Listen.  
Lock the door.  
Close the curtains.  
“Lumos.”  
Go to bed.  
Listen.

“Draco!”   
I would’ve gasped and looked over at my mother.  
She sighed. “I’m sorry, dear. You did not respond.”  
“It’s fine.” My voice would’ve been hoarse. If I hadn’t felt it vibrate in my throat I would not have believed it to be my own. I heard it so rarely recently. “What is it?”   
“I was just going to ask if you wanted to come with me to town. Get some fresh air.”  
She didn’t say it but she wanted me to get out of the house. I would’ve been grateful for that and nodded.  
The sun was shining outside even though it was a fresh autumn morning. But its light. Was it real? It felt dark. Like in a memory.  
I would’ve startled at every twig crackling under my feet.  
“Draco, dear, I’ll go into the flower shop real quick. You don’t have to go in with me.”  
I would’ve waited outside.   
If only the passer-bys, Muggle and Wizarding alike, wouldn’t have looked at me like a ghost. Like a resurrected evidence of evil. I felt sick and would’ve gone inside to look for my mother.  
Flowers. Humans. Full of live. Cut at their stems. Throats. Dying. 

Listen.  
Voices, murmured, all around.  
Close your eyes.  
Their gazes. Heavy. Did they know?  
“Lumos.”  
No light. Darkness persisted. Darkness unchasable. Full of pain.  
Listen.

“Lumos!” I would’ve flinched.   
My mother’s hands were on my shoulders. “Let’s get out of here, dear.” An urge in her voice.  
Light returned, but not upon my command.  
I remembered it being difficult, when everything was still happening. Now it was over and you’d think it would be easier. But at least in the present, I knew it was real. Now it was the past and I didn’t know anymore what was real. Was it the future? Was it all me? If it was truly over, was I too?  
“Oh, look at the baby ducks.”  
I would’ve smiled. “So many of them.”  
“Following their mothers. How precious.”  
I would’ve watched them for a while. At least out here you could blame the voices on people taking a walk, blame the shadows on trees under sunlight, blame the sudden movements on animals taking flight. I would not have been able to go back inside.  
My mother paused in the entrance hall. “Is everything all right, dear?”  
“I forgot my coat,” I would’ve lied.  
“Your coat? But you’re wearing it.”  
I would’ve shaken my head. “The other-, The other coat.” And I would’ve turned back around. Back to the pond and the park and the ducks until it would’ve turned dark and the shadows would have caught up with me there too. 

Listen.  
Lock the door.  
Close the curtains.  
“Lumos.”  
Go to bed.  
Listen.

The nightmare woke me sweat-drenched and shaking. Cold and hot at the same time, in a feeling of utter inexistance. Both could not exist, light and dark, death and life, so where was I in all of this?   
“I can’t, mother. I can’t anymore.”   
Her hand was still on my wand, my tight grip not allowing her to take it away, her tight grip not allowing me to point its tip back at my throat. “I know,” she whispered. “I know. You must leave.”   
“How?”  
“Far away.”  
“Where?”  
“On your own.”   
“They’ll follow me everywhere.”

I started in the south. Spain. Italy. Morocco. It was warm there. Full of light. Full of colours. And the whispers outside my hotel rooms were all in languages I did not speak. They basked me into sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

“Is that the Malfoy boy?”  
“Oh by Merlin, lower your voice.”  
“But is it true what they say? His father only did two, not ten years?”  
“Shh.”

Listen.  
Lock the door.  
Go to bed.  
Close the curtains.  
“Lumos.”  
Listen.

The voices of my dormmates’ whispering ebbed away into the night. I stayed awake for much longer than that. They said Hogwarts was the safest place in Britain. I never dowsed the light of my wand anyway. There was always a way to make a place unsafe. 

In class, I had once been beaten in scores by a witch, now that she had graduated before me, I was finally able to be top of the class now. Strange, how I didn’t care anymore. It had once been all that mattered to me. Show that mudblood who the Malfoys were. Now I did not know who I was showing it to, or what I was showing them. I was here because I could not go back anymore. Because I had burnt my own picture on our family tree, because the Malfoys were without heir, because I was not one of them anymore, because I couldn’t go back, because I needed to live.  
Live. Differently. Somehow. Maybe.  
Perhaps Hogwarts was the closest to life I could get anymore. And still I listened into the night. Still I double-locked the door after everyone was already long asleep. Still I spell-bound the curtains of my bed close, put a silencing charm on them so no one could hear my nightmares. Still I slept with my wand spending light, because there was none of it left within me anymore. And still I listened. Waiting. Waiting for the voices. For the ghosts. For the past.  
And it came. It always came.

“May I sit?” She had almost as blonde hair as me.  
“If you care.” At first I thought it would remind me of my family. In the end it reminded me of the sun.  
“So did you understand what they mean with exercise seven?” she asked, opening her homeworks, the question so mundane it almost would’ve startled me, “‘Raising the potion until it quivers’. Can’t imagine how that would work.” Her voice was soft, her words of an elegant, well-chosen accent. But it was the chiming melody within them that would’ve had my gaze follow her lips.  
“It’s the potion with rat milk, isn’t it? Milk doesn’t boil,” I explained, hesitantly, quietly, “Quiver is the old term for simmering. You have to cook and stir it until it rises and simmers, then gather the resulting foam.”  
“Oh!” Her face lit up. Like clouds letting patches of blue sky peek through. “Yes, that makes sense. Asking the Malfoy was a good idea, after all. I’ll have to remember that.”  
“You know who I am?”  
She chuckled, barely looking up as she noted down what I would’ve told her. “We’ve been sharing classes for a year now, I sure hope I know who you are.”  
I would’ve frowned. “No, I mean-,”  
“Draco,” she interrupted me, her green eyes suddenly firm on mine. “We’ve been sharing classes for a year now. _I know who you are_.” 

The first time she kissed me, it was because we had passed our Sixth Year exams. She said it was to thank me for helping her study, but I would’ve guessed that she had known the answers to most questions she had asked me by herself anyway.

Listen.  
Lock the door.  
Go to bed.  
Close the curtains.  
“Lumos.”  
Listen to her breath.  
She was deep asleep, her yellow hair splashing out from under the blanket like the sun rays on a children’s drawing. “Draco?”  
“Yes. Sorry.” I would’ve taken off my morning robe, hung it to the curtains as she stirred in drowsiness. I would’ve looked at her.  
She smiled, shielding her face from the light. “What is it?” she murmured.  
“You’re beautiful.”  
“Oh, Draco,” she chuckled, clicking her tongue and tugging on my nightgown. “Turn off the light and come to sleep already.”  
I would’ve paused. If there had been a smile on my lips, it would’ve been dowsed now.  
In the white light, her eyes appeared even more green. Like Spring. Full of life.  
“Astoria, I-...”  
“You’re right.” She shook her head. Held up the blanket. “C’m here. When I sleep, I have my eyes closed anyway.”  
I would’ve obliged.  
In our year, they called her the cursed Greengrass. In our dorm, they called her the Ravenclaw who stole that Malfoy boy to the towers. I called her Astoria Ad Astra, because the sun too was a star.


	3. Chapter 3

Listen.  
Lock the car. Pay the driver.  
Go down the driveway to the house.  
Close your eyes.  
Take a breath.  
“Astoria.”  
“I’m here, Draco.” She took my hand. “You’re here.”  
Was I? Maybe I would’ve been, if it wasn’t already late in the evening and the shadows lurking in the garden spoke of memories I tried so desperately to forget despite being held so captive in their narrative.  
We knocked. We listened.  
It was my mother who opened the door. It had been five years but she was still as tall as I remembered her. “Draco,” she breathed, and she made me remember the embrace that had once saved our lives.  
“Mother, this is Astoria.” I wouldn’t have barely noticed how her love had drawn me over the threshold.  
“It is nice to meet you, Mrs Malfoy.”  
“Oh my, what a beautiful young woman you are!” She too was drawn inside, even if only by a handshake. “We are so happy you-, so happy you come to visit us.”  
I would’ve nodded, feeling my muscles tense as the door fell close behind us, trapping as, as I would’ve pretended that I didn’t know how my mother’s sentence had originally meant to end.  
“Come to the tea room, Lucius will be there in a moment. Come, come.”  
Listen.  
Lock your mind.  
Follow.  
Close your heart.  
Breathe.  
The floor, once covered in corpses. The wall, once splattered with blood. The couch, once pierced with ownerless wands. I saw it. I could still see it. The past. Like the present. No would-bes, only truth, before my eyes, burning alive.  
“Sit down my dears, sit down! Here, let Lola take your coats. There, wonderf-...”  
It was the sudden silence that would’ve drawn me back to the light.  
“Wonderful,” my mother finished in a whisper, and I didn’t need to follow her gaze to know where she was looking at.  
Astoria’s hand lay heavy in mine. The other on her swollen belly. She was smiling. “Seven months. The doctors say it’s a boy.”  
My mother exhaled. Slowly, she took a step closer, hesitated, waited for permission, then sank to her knees. Her hands were shaking as they reached for Astoria’s roundness, the nameless, still faceless, unborn life before her, and her eyes shut tight as her forehead rested against it. “Life,” she whispered, “life once again.” And when Astoria’s hand caressed her hair, tears befell her cheeks. “Thank you.”  
Astoria chuckled but did not show a sign of mockery or awkwardness. There was only gentleness. As though they hadn’t just met. “If he had been a girl, we thought about naming her after you. Now that we know he’s a boy-...”  
My mother raised her tearful gaze to Astoria. To me. “Lucius?” she asked, and I would’ve nodded.

There were no ducks on the pond that night.  
It had been a warm Summer day, but night brought chills upon our skin as we stood there, hand in hand, watching the stillness of the water.  
“It’s okay,” Astoria said, eventually, and her voice was as gentle as the moonlight’s reflection that distinguished the water from the grass around it. “I won’t make you go back anymore.”  
“It was a good idea.”  
“I could’ve been one.”  
I held her hand a little tighter. “We won’t name him Lucius.”  
A little chuckle escaped her. “No, perhaps we shouldn’t.”  
“Hyperion?”  
“No, neither.”  
“Why not?”  
“Because I don’t want us to be chasing the past anymore. Because I thought that’s what we needed, because I thought we wouldn’t be happy if you couldn’t tie up those loose ends. But I was wrong. I was wrong and you were right. This house is toxic, and we don’t need our son to grow up believing that he has to fit into it just because he is the heir of it. Because his name connects him to it.”  
“He’s only the heir if we marry.”  
“We will.”  
“Astoria…”  
“No, Draco. We must.”  
“He’d be a Greengrass.”  
“He’ll be a Malfoy.”  
“But you just said-,”  
“You’re a Malfoy. You might have renounced the heritage, but you’re still a Malfoy. And perhaps I don’t want him to be like this reputable, sickening, horrible, horrible asshole of a man you once called your father, but I do want him to be like you.”  
A smile would’ve seized my lips as anger had once again flared up in Astoria’s eyes, and I would’ve been too slow to erase it when her next words came. “I love you,” I would’ve said, because it was the truth.  
She raised my hand and pressed a kiss to it. “I’m sorry for having talked you into this tonight. I should’ve listened.”  
“It was a good idea.”  
“It could’ve been.”  
I would’ve shaken my head and turned to her, growing weary of the moon, but never of the stars. “It was. It proved me that leaving here, leaving with you, has been the right decision. To never come back, to-, to look ahead-... To go ahead, I think-...”  
She nodded. “I’ll be there to help you.”  
“I know. That’s why he’ll be a son of the stars.”  
In a soundless breath of two people coincidentally sharing the same idea, our eyes wandered up to the sky above, and as they found a star so red that it spoke of the opposite of war, I knew that perhaps my future would remain subjunctive, but Scorpius’ would shine bright with certitude and light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed. I'm sorry there are not many paragraph breaks. I'm not someone who reads or writes much fan fiction, so the style of having a line-in-paragraph break instead of a  
> jump-paragraph break never quite grew on me. Maybe I should rework it eventually and make it easier to read, but since the chapters are all so very short, I hope you can forgive until then.


End file.
